When I was fifteen (back in the last century), my dad bought me a copy of John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, a brand-new hardcover copy – a very big deal. I read the book hungrily, a book both technical and visionary, and carried it with me through all those moves of my twenties. Here’s a sampling:

The novelist Nicholas Delbanco has remarked that by the age of four one has experienced nearly everything one needs as a writer of fiction: love, pain, loss, boredom, rage, guilt, fear of death. The writer’s business is to make up convincing human beings and create for them basic situations and actions by means of which they come to know themselves and reveal themselves to the reader. For that one needs no schooling. But it’s by training – by studying great books and by writing – that one learns to present one’s fictions, giving them their due.

Which pretty much means: get down to work. I love fiction so much I find it almost incomprehensible that anyone would want to do anything else – like, say, teach kindergarten or litigate. My own teenage daughter’s natural inclinations bend towards art and photography, although she would never define or see herself as an artist. I remembered Gardner’s lines above when I saw this photo: her own way of taking things apart – a drinking glass, the kitchen table, sunlight – wondering how does this work? how does this look? what can I do?

Photo by Molly S.

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About Brett Ann Stanciu

A writer and sugarmaker, Brett Ann lives with her two daughters in stony soil Vermont. Her novel HIDDEN VIEW was published by Green Writers Press in the fall of 2015.
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“With vivid and richly textured prose, Brett Ann Stanciu offers unsparing portraits of northern New England life well beyond sight of the ski lodges and postcard views. The work the land demands, the blood ties of family to the land, and to each other, the profound solitude that such hard-bitten lives thrusts upon the people, are here in true measure. A moving and evocative tale that will stay with you, Hidden View also provides one of the most compelling and honest rural woman’s viewpoint to come along in years. A novel of singular accomplishment.” – Jeffrey Lent

“Early in the book, I was swept by a certainty of truths in Hidden View: that Stanciu knew the bizarre and fragile construction that people’s self-deceptions can frame. And that she was telling, out in public, against all the rules, the heartbreaking story of far too many women I’ve known, at one time or another, who struggled to make their dreams come to reality in situations…. …(In Hidden View) the questions of loyalty to person, commitment to dreams, and betrayal of the helpless are as vivid as the flames in the sugarhouse, as sweet and dangerous as the hot boiling maple sap on its way to becoming valuable syrup. There’s so much truth in this book that at some point, it stops being “fiction” and stands instead as a portrait, layered, complex, and wise. The Vermont that we love, the farms that we treasure, the children we nurture are fully present.” – Kingdom Books, Beth Kanell

“Stanciu is a Vermonter’s ‬writer. Anyone who loves the landscape and language of Vermont will be ‬drawn into this story, but her writing holds a universal appeal, too, ‬and rings true with the language and landscape of the human heart and ‬mind as well. The characters in Hidden View are people you’re ‬going to think about, and care about, long after the book is read.” – Natalie Kinsey-Warnock, AS LONG AS THERE ARE MOUNTAINS

"Brett Stanciu writes with enviable poise and precision. Hidden View is a story that burrows deep and stays put. This is a powerful novel."
– Ben Hewitt, THE TOWN THAT FOOD SAVED and
HOME GROWN

"(Stanciu") combines her academic life with her agricultural life to write an enduring story… as rugged as the earth it is based on."
– Steve Pappas, The Barre-Montpelier Times-Argus, Vermont Sunday Magazine

"Stanciu is Vermont through and through. The same can be said of her first novel...”
– Seven Days

"Hidden View is pure authenticity. Every word rings true to this place and its people; I know; I've lived here for 45 years."
– David Budbill, JUDEVINE